I know a lot of people looking for community and gift economy resources right now, so I’d like to share a few things I’ve found with you:

http://shareable.net/
which is a website FULL of information about gifting, sharing, community, and freely available resources of every variety.

http://communiteach.com/ is about how to reach out in your area and teach or learn something. I know a few people working on this idea on a smaller, more personal scale, and I’m so excited to see these resources developing.

http://timebanks.org/ is a way for communities to get together and barter resources and time.

knowing these larger resources exist gives me a bit of hope: that perhaps we really are learning to value connection and community over monetary gain on a larger, cultural scale.
I wish so much that I was a better writer, better at articulation; I see so much going on right now that is addressing the desires that I have to find more and better ways for us to connect to other people and I want to be able to clearly, loudly, celebrate and champion these ideas! I really believe that here, too, is a role for making … for craft, artwork, and aesthetics to tighten this connection between people.
I’m still working on it.

but for now you should have this:

Life is pretty bleak at the top too — and all of the baubles of the rich… they’re kind of this phony compensation for the loss of what’s really important: the loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy, the loss of meaning. Everybody wants to live a life of meaning, and today we live in a money economy where we don’t really depend on the gifts of anybody, but we buy everything. Therefore we don’t really need anybody because whoever grew my food or made my clothes or built my house — well if they died or if I alienate them — if they don’t like me, that’s okay, I can just pay somebody else to do it. It’s really hard to create community if the underlying knowledge is … we don’t need each other. Some people kinda get together and act nice or maybe they consume together but joint consumption doesn’t create intimacy — only joint creativity and gifts create intimacy and connection.

y’all, has it ever.

So far this has been a strange school-year for me, getting caught in between BUSYBUSYBUSY and dull moments of trying to figure out what to do next.

I did promise myself though that I would post about speaking about community interaction through travel at the 2011 Alliance of Artistic Communities conference. I discussed my roadtrip, of course, as a way to explore a community that I otherwise mainly interact with on the internet. You’re probably familiar with this (since you’re reading my website and all), but, I also found three other Book & Paper interested artists who have taken up travel as part of their practice, and I’d like to introduce them to you. :)

The first fellow traveling book artists I found were Peter and Donna Thomas, who write about their experiences at Adventures of the Wandering Book Artists. These two artists started out their practice by doing hand papermaking demos at Ren Faires and craft fairs, which is where their love for the gypsy wagon they travel in developed. So in 2010, they spent two-third of the year traveling to over 35 states, teaching and visiting art centers along the way!

The next person I digitally-”ran into” was book artist Simon Goode, who came over from the UK to the US to visit book arts centers–he’s looking to open the first book arts center in London. He blogs (posting photographs and writings) about his travels here at Simon Goes, and I narrowly missed him when he came to visit Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts. awwh. :\ maybe next time, right?

Finally, there is Kyle Durrie of the Moveable Type Truck, and whom my last post was halfway about. She’s still traveling the country, showing off the goodies of letterpress, and she also just visited my dear friend Rachel at Green Pea Press in Alabama! I’m still excited about it, even though it was a month ago and of course here I was in Chicago.

ever onwards~

how’s everyone doing out there?
I know it’s been a hot minute, but there’s been a lot of fun (and sorta-fun) things going on in my life:

we hosted our own couchsurfers for the first time (!!!) during the 2011 Chicago Couchcrash (and we loved having you, Nick and Rudy!)

Matt and I with one of our 'surfers, Nick

We didn’t get to go to a ton of events, but let me tell you, the ones we did make it to had the most welcoming and friendly people I’ve ever met. Where else could you find 150 people at a party, 95% who have never met each other before, half of whom don’t even live in the state, and everyone having a fabulous time?
There’s really something here about generosity building community.

Then classes started, which means thesis. Ah yes, that word that inspires so much creativity and dread. Who knew it would be so hard to write about my thesis proposal in under 150 words?

And, last but not least, last weekend I visited the Renegade Craft Fair, a now-international DIY craft market that started here in Chicago in 2003.
I was merely wandering around finding cute things (like these gems)

until we stumbled across…dun dun dun…Moveable Type! I wish I had gotten a better picture, but if you’ve ever been to Renegade, you know it was packed–but that’s a good (even great!) thing. :)

I had heard about Kyle Durrie’s traveling letterpress project (yup–another traveling member of the bookarts world!) and knew she was hovering around the Great Lakes area, but didn’t know she’d be here!
Squee!

visitor printing, Kyle on the right

I only got to geek out for a minute over her travel maps

before I got to use her proof press to make my own Chicago-themed Moveable Type print

ILSSA print from 2010's Printers Ball on top, Moveable Type print on bottom

thank you so much for coming to Chicago Kyle! I wish you the best on your travels. Happy printing!

These two awesome day sponsors sent in their donations while we were on the road and didn’t pick any particular city. So I chose the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, outside of Penland, for Marcia (Matt’s stepmom–Hi Marcia!)

blue ridge mountains

We were lucky enough to host Marcia and Matt’s dad, Mike, for a few days last week, so I didn’t have a chance to post this drawing before then, but I hope y’all enjoy it!

My last-but-definitely-not-least sponsor is Mel Potter, my wonderful papermaking teacher and advisor at Columbia College. Again, Mel didn’t chose a particular city, so I picked an artifact from the Robert C Williams papermaking museum in Atlanta: a Dard Hunter watermark.

Dard Hunter watermark

like a real watermark, it was a bit hard to photograph (I used metallic ink–as close as I could think of to “draw” a watermark), but I think I did pretty alright!
Mel, thank you so much, and I dearly look forward to working with you this fall! :)

& everyone else:

I’m contacting local places now, and hopefully will have a few more book & paper & community art places to showcase here. hooray! :)

I know this is a little overdue–we arrived home to Chicago back on August 1st, but we also brought back traveling colds (blegh) and a cat (hooray!) and so I’ve been occupied.

And, well, there’s just a lot to sort through. We met over fifty people in twenty-two different cities in five weeks. I’ll let that sink in for a minute, because even though it happened to me, it still blows my mind every time I think of it.

some of the wonderful people on our journey

I saw both more and less than I was hoping to: less, because of a blasted heat wave while we were in NYC, Phila, DC, and Roanoke (bah!); more, because people were willing to show us everything they had to offer.
In this way, I also learned both more and less about the ideas of making+giving+community than I set out to find: less, in that I didn’t ask as many specific questions as I wanted (and I had a LOT! but time constraints)… and more, in that more ideas and connections popped up during this trip than even I ever expected.

This was one of the major reasons for this trip–seeing first hand how the book arts world functions and communicates is a valuable lesson in how it builds community. Another major reason, though, was how generosity functions for and within a community, and on that aspect I have been absolutely blown away.

When I first planned this trip, I sent out an email asking for suggestions, expecting that I would then have to contact the people and places I wanted to see. Graciously people started offering tours and sending out invitations before I ever had a chance to contact them first! I actually ended up planning the trip about those who had invited me to see them (with a few exceptions), and I had received an invitation for almost every relevant place along our route. (I, in fact, received more invitations than we could ever visit in five weeks, and those who we did get to see realize what a tight schedule we were already on!)

I also had mentioned in the first outgoing email that we were planning on couchsurfing. While I intended to utilize the couchsurfing.com website, we instead ended up with an outpouring of offers to let us stay. Consider that this meant ten people who had never met us let both Matt and I stay in their house — sometimes for multiple days! — just based on the understanding that we were visiting book arts and community art centers.

I saw more wonderful places, met more fascinating people, and learned more about the community than I thought I could–and I set out with high expectations. I collected twenty-two hours of recordings about these people and centers, over a thousand photos, and a book full of notes and ideas.

This is fascinating to you I’m sure, but it doesn’t answer what most people have been curious about.
What in the world am I going to do with all of this information?

studios, workspaces, & prints

While I’m sure that there are many fruits of this labor that will take a long time to reveal themselves, the biggest and most immediate benefit is that this trip was the beginning stages of my thesis exploration into how making, giving, and community interact. This (as you may remember) was my plan all along, so now that I’ve experienced the generosity of this community on many levels, it’s my turn to make a gift for everyone who participated. I believe most of us understand the use of physical objects as reminders of our relationships to others — touchstones, in a way — and letters and mementos gain an additional importance when they are handmade. These gifts will only be small tokens of my appreciation for all the help given to me, but I believe the handmade gift is a vital element of “keeping in touch” with such a wonderful group of people.

Once that is completed, the next step is more obvious: I intend to make a book of the trip and the resulting connections and communications made. As it’s a next step in thesis project, this isn’t solidified yet, but more will be available about it as it develops.

I look forward to staying in contact with y’all and watching how our ties strengthen. The journey has only begun!